Tim Peake and space station crew mates return to Earth

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that constitutes most of the material universe, remains as elusive as ever. Although experiments on the ground and in space have yet to find a trace of dark matter, six or more years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has broadened the mission’s dark matter hunt using some novel approaches.

Imagery captured by a sharp-eyed camera aboard a NASA orbiter shows where Europe’s Schiaparelli lander cratered on Mars last week, exploding into fine bits of shrapnel and debris after after an apparent software problem doomed the mission, officials said Thursday.

ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has witnessed 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko make its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) at 3:03am BST on 13 August, when the comet came within 116 million miles of our nearest star. Rosetta’s measurements suggest the comet is currently spewing up to 300kg of water vapour and a metric tonne of dust every second, creating dangerous working conditions for the spacecraft.